Very many devices, such as the one in the U.S. Pat. No. 4,703,650, have been proposed for transmitting, to a central unit, in a regular fashion, inflation pressure measurements for each tire accompanied, where applicable, by measurements of the temperature of the internal air of the tires.
However, knowledge of the inflation pressures does not suffice to give the driver reliable and useful information. There is a risk that continuous consultation of this information may be more tedious than actually useful. This because tire pressure and/or temperature measurements vary enormously in running because of the heating of the tires due to its hysteresis losses, the influence of the heat given off by the brakes and load transfers that cause slight variations in the volume of the tires.
This is why, in the patent U.S. Pat. No. 4,893,110, a method was proposed for using measurements based on comparisons between two or more two tires that aims to be able to give an alarm in the event of failure of a tire without adopting alert thresholds excessively departing from the precision achieved by the measuring devices.
This treatment, despite its advantage, has not completely resolved the problem. This is because the improvement in the precision of detection in the case of failure of a tire requires the initial pressures of the tires to be strictly identical. In reality such is not at all the case and it is entirely usually and normal to observe differences in inflation pressure when cold of around 10% or even 15%. This is moreover the range accepted by the European Tire and Rim Technical Organisation (ETRTO) for heavy vehicles, for example. These differences are due in particular to the precision of inflation pressure gauges of around 5%, to imprecision during inflation of around 3%, to the consequences of exposure of the tires to sunshine, etc. The method described in the application cited cannot therefore have better detection precision than the usual initial differences if it is not wished to cause many false alarms. Consequently detection of failure of one of the tires can be achieved only after a very appreciable reduction in the inflation pressure of the tire, which requires immediate repair action.
The application EP 0786361A proposes a method of detecting a slow leak in one of the tires of a vehicle in which the variation over time in the pressure differences between two adjacent tires is monitored and an alarm is triggered when this variation exceeds a given threshold.
This method effectively make it possible to detect a slow leak in a tire very early but proves ineffective when a leak affects the two tires being monitored in a similar fashion. It may therefore be useful to supplement it with a method based on the use of measurements made upon a single tire.